Hangul Syllables


Hangul Syllables is a Unicode block containing precomposed Hangul syllable blocks for modern Korean. The syllables can be directly mapped by algorithm to sequences of two or three characters in the Hangul Jamo Unicode block:
  • one of U+1100–U+1112: the 19 modern Hangul leading consonant jamos;
  • one of U+1161–U+1175: the 21 modern Hangul vowel jamos;
  • none, or one of U+11A8–U+11C2: the 27 modern Hangul trailing consonant jamos.
This block is encoded according to the canonically equivalent order of these jamos composing each syllable.
Note that a full Hangul syllable may include one of these characters but may be preceded by one or more leading consonant jamos, and followed by one or more trailing jamos. As well some Hangul syllables may not include any one of these precomposed character. But such extension of the Hangul script is not very common in modern Korean.

History

Encoding hangul syllables in Unicode was complicated by a reorganization of the code points:
explains that this significant incompatible change was made on the assumption that no data or software using Unicode for Korean existed:
Subsequently, Unicode adopted an encoding stability policy which states that "Once a character is encoded, it will not be moved or removed".
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Hangul Syllables block: